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So Alister Is The Best Tank Ehhh?

The thing about tanks in general is that during pub play you're likely to not get recognized as doing your job. Worse players will look at your K/D ratio and complain that you were a feeder or that you didn't do anything. For some reason people really don't appriciate the assist stat or the tower stat or god forbid anything but stats.

A good Alister with a decent team mate is going to "win" his lane and get no or almost no kills doing it. He'll facilitate aces/near aces even if he dies doing it. If you want showy moves and big noticable displays of "awesomeness" Alisters probably one of the worst champs for it.

not quite sure if someone pointed this out but a tank is the one that engages the fight first. which means, they are the first to be targetted by the enemy team and if they die. they have better die taking atleast 2-4 of the enemy with them. (assuming it was a 5v5 team fight)

but all in all, the tank is the one that engages the fight, gets nuked by the enemy team, throws down their CC, and watch as the enemy team run away from terror or god-forbid fights your tank instead of killing away the squishies.

Alister is a great tank to start with. What you should be doing is flashing/ghosting in to the other team, popping R if you get focused, and hitting their carry with the QW 1-2 punch, moving him away from their team, and into a place where your team can easily kill him.

As for Items, well there's one problem with ali. He's the worst farmer in the game.

As with any tank, your build depends on the other team. Regardless, open with chalice, and boots of swiftness (or mercuries if they have a lot of mages and CC.)

If they're all physical DPS, stack 4 hearts of gold, then sell them to get better items. I'd grab wardens and thornmail.

If there's a mix, then buy what you feel is best. Either way, after it becomes very very hard to kill you, they'll start to ignore you even in teamfights, so you can happily go in and punt anyone back to your team. Hopefully, after the first one you do this to goes down, the enemies will run like hell, at which point you chase them and as the cooldowns come off grab another 1-2 to kill.

Last piece of advice: Ali's Cooldowns are long. Grab at least 1 item to help with that. Sprit visage and Glacial shroud are my usual choices.

EDIT: Also, your stats will suck. But even if you go 1-4-15, which is average for me, you probably facilitated that big push your team should have made.

Advice 2. If you're low ELO, do NOT solo queue ali and expect to pwn. I've had my entire team ignore the twitch/fiddle I just punted back next to our tower and team, and charge in against the other team's tank. Then I got bawled out for not doing any damage to their cho/rammus/other tank.

These posts always make me laugh because I used to feel the same way about tanks, found them completely useless when I first started playing. In the early stages of the game, they kind of are useless because they require a decent team to do well in. Past level 15ish though they are needed. You cannot play a game with 5 squishies and expect to win unless the other team is just bad.

I have dabbled with Alistar but my favorite "tank" is still Taric.

Aura Taric fits the definition of a tank perfectly "Someone you want to ignore but can't."

Here is a typical team battle.

If they choose to ignore me, I stun their carry, heal the teammate they are going after, shatter their team causing reduced armor, and pop radiance giving my team added damage and health regen. This combined with Aegis, Soul Shroud, and Starks means a dead enemy team.

If they decide to attack me first, I stun their carry, shatter, heal myself, radiance, and watch them sit there trying to do damage to me with my huge armor stat and 20% dodge. My teammates quickly mop up the rest of them. Also if they try to stun or exhaust me, I simply use cleanse, completely wasting their power and allowing me to continue being a threat.

My damage is absolutely terrible, but I can stay alive while continuing to benefit my allies simply from being around them. I also can tank turrets by myself. I turn decent teams into good teams and good teams into undefeatable teams.

The only bad thing is going into a bad team. Taric in a bad team is useless because your team is too afraid to attack when you initiate.

He has two powerful crowd control abilities, a team heal, and an ultimate that makes him invincible. His passive makes him hit towers extra hard and he levels/scales incredibly with a lot of natural HP and damage.

Also, since everyone else did such a great job of covering why he's such a beast, let's not forget one of his secret top-tier advantages: Alistar has such a large model that it's easier for enemies to accidentally click on him when targeting spells.

Alistar is horrible at farming but a real pain in the butt to kill. With his skills you can be low health and cause a melee champ to chase you fully across the map stunning/headbutting them each time the skill is up delaying their chance to kill you.

This gives him decent hp's / regen / armor while you are building cash to work your way into real items. Since I have started doing this build it is rare by the end of the game I am not in competitive gear. Prior to doing this loadout I would almost always end up in subpar gear and very ineffective as you usually will be at half or 1/3 creep kills compared to most other champions. (Sure you can get many creep kills but you pretty much have to be soloing)

Late game though in heavy tank gear you can have their whole team pounding on you for a good 10-15 second and still escape with half a health bar. They almost always blow all their ulti's on you and your team almost always cleans their clock. (This is assuming your team has even a whiff of cohesion).

People also forget he is amazing at early ganking. Unless your opponents have a built in flash or are tanks themselves, you and your lane partner can most likely kill them. If not, they can harass them all the way back to their tower.

I play with a friend who mains Morgana, if he gets a Dark Binding off it's over with a squishy, and will most likely kill even tougher heroes. They hurt us? I can spam heal back to full. Paired with any sort of CC or burst, you can shut down a lane easily.

Then at ~10 you can start engaging team fights without worrying about mana so much, go tower diving to punt people back, pushing lanes like crazy, etc.

I've literally initiated in a team fight which lead to an ace beside their own turret at level 11. No other tank can do that and live.